Of The Bleeding Text: Towards a Theory of Intrapersonal Violence [Amalgamative Draft]

Of the Bleeding Text

Towards a Theory of Intrapersonal Violence

Zachariah  Brumaire

In partial fulfillment of the Politics Major

"Do I contradict myself? 

Very well then I contradict myself, 

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)" 

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

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“And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains: Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him. 

“And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.

“But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him, And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not. For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit.

“And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many. And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country.”

The Gospel According to Mark 5:2-10

King James Version

Acknowledgements

Olivia Gilbert, Jack Jackson, Sussane Beechy, Paul Apostolidis, Arash Davari, Jonathan Walters, Nikolus Kennely, Jeremiah Silverheart, Marco Blume, Hel Platt, Fi Black, Jonathan Falk, Balreet Pawar, Thatcher Carter, and Tricia __

shasta showles, alex feller, 

alexa, shy

thomas meinzen 

0. What Am I Doing Here?

Ten minutes to class. Voices outside. Faces smoothed of all meaning. Bodies leaning untimely pillars. And me. Sitting in the corner of the second-floor bathroom. Cold tiles I can’t feel. The dull blast of the water well on its way to becoming a nonpresence, my ears going numb to an anxious calmor of someone singing about nostalgia and pain.

Things move fast. Same room, same time, last week. I was brushing my teeth before walking into a seminar for which I’d done no reading, hoping people won’t be able to smell the alcohol on my breath. 

No alcohol, no toothbrush tonight. Not that I didn’t want to drink. Nor that I didn’t not want to, either. Wanting takes on a complex meaning when I’m like this, not at all in confirmation with itself. This isn’t profound: it’s just painful. 

I didn’t bring a knife. I wish I had. My fingernails feel soft. I’m a sponge in a blender. 

I finish the bloody work and focus on cleaning up. I did bring gauze (these days I’m always carrying gauze). One hand wraps the other. There’s not enough, but I augment with paper towels and long sleeves and silence. 

I am in a dissociative state. My therapists (four in as many months), psychiatrists, nurses, usually describe this as watching oneself from outside the body. Close, not quite (for me at least). More like not standing anywhere, a void where a self should be, but a watchful void, one which stares into itself. I feel things and I don’t feel things. This doesn’t make sense. Not incidentally, this is around the time I gave up making sense.

Break comes half-way through class. Paul looks at me. ‘How are you doing?’

Smile sadly. Be resolute: don’t cause worry. God knows you’ve worried enough people. ‘I think I am going to leave now.’

‘Are you going to be ok?’

‘Oh yeah, I’m an old hand at this.’ I don’t remember when I started saying that. Probably after the first trip to the ER, after a nurse taught me how to clean and treat the dozens of thin red lines and angry clouds of blood which constitute the only ontology I know to anchor myself at times like these.

The health center nurse is alarmed by the blood. Says my eyes are dilated. Doesn’t like how I’m pacing. Rocking back and forth on the floor. Its always a crapshoot—some nurses barely react, especially when they’ve treated me a few times already (I go there whenever the nights get especially bad, or whenever I need to reassure someone else that I’m going to be ok).

She wants to send me to the ER. I’m too tired to argue. I’m on suicide watch for a few hours. I talk to a hospital chaplain about intrusive thoughts and he waxes nostalgic about his sex life. Its all very much. A psychiatrist asks me about my prescriptions. By now I’m coming down, I think I even try to reassure the chaplain, uneasy at leaving him anxious. One last bandage check. They drive me back to the center by 2 am. Some weeks I spend more nights here than my own apartment.

§ 

Self-harm is a problem for political theory and practice. At the practical level, the question of how to understand ..

From the Hospital to the welfare state, from police and prisons to the relationship between parents and children the question of how to understand and respond to people who hurt themselves exists simultaneously in the realm of concrete medical-disciplinary tactics and broader political-philosophical implications. Does one engage or ignore the self-harmer? Attempt to stop him, 

The terms by which self-harm is engaged, whether to stop, to ignore, to aid, or ot them in their activities, by what 

, which metrics to use in the evaluation of relative and qualitative risk, which resources to dedicate to managing self-harmers, and whose self harm is deserving of intervention questions haunt these institutions, arising irregularly and presenting problems quite inverse to the those matters which, unless they specialize in self-harm, they are used to dealing with. 

How do we make sense of a Subject who hurts himself, especially within a field of study, such as politics, where the Subject has been traditionally associated with rationality and self-interest? 

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I am by not means the first to inquire after the political history and significance of self-harm.

 In his extrmely thorough and radically imagininative text A History of Self-Harm in Britain: A Geneology of Cutting and Overdosing, Christopher Millard draws on the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking in order to ask how self-harm came to acquire its present meanings: 

It is a central contention of this book that the ways in which we make sense of our world, the categories and concepts that are available to understand human behavior (such as self-cutting) resonate with and correspond to larger political constellations. The objects that seem natural—that seem to have an independent, common-sense existence—are not outside of culture, politics, or ethics. In order to better understand this shift, this book reconstructs the middle phase of self-harm, alongside some stereotypes that preceded and succeeded it for comparison. Thus, the book aims to draw in detail an explanation of self-harm that relies upon the ‘social setting’. This will establish a striking contrast with an explanation that has displaced ‘the social’ with explanations based on internal emotional states—which become increasingly expressed in neurological terms.    (Millard 2-3)

Millard’s review of the historical record of self-harm has provided a much of basis for my own research and analysis, as have his original and piercing theoretical interventions. That said, Millard (like Foucualt before him) is occupied principally with tracking the genealogy of concepts of madness, mental illness, suicidality and self-harm. He also admits himself that [personal expirence] because [epistimology]

In contrast, my intervention in this essay attempts to go beyond Millard in two ways. First, as a matter of ciritque, I am interested in exposing a common trend in understandings of self-harm documented by Millard as well as a number of other psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and sociological researchers, a trend which spans a broad range of historical periods and ideological schools. This trend is the tendency, prevailing over roughly the past century in the anglophonic world, to conceive of the self-harming subject in individual terms, to locate the ultimate significance and cause of her self-destructive behavior in herself. Certainly this individualization has taken a broad range of forms--from the simplistic desire to die, to the socially grounded and usually manipulative “suicidal gesture,” to the psychoanalytic need to reveal or protect oneself from some inner truth, to the model (which became dominant in America and Britain over the course of the 70s and 80s and which intersected in key material ways with the neoliberal turn) to understand DSH as the self-regulation of otherwise overwhelming affect-states. In response to this neoliberal turn, there have likewise been a number of interventions (Millard’s among them) which seek to recall or, in some case, return outright to a model which understands self harm in terms of social and political-economic forces acting on and through the individual subject. 

This obsessive and widespread fixation on the individual goes largely unacknowledged, as if it constituted a kind of pre-discursive background and foundation to discourse, the proverbial water in which we swim. I myself became attentive to this trend long before taking up any kind of formal academic work on the topic when self-harm became, suddenly and without warning, a central aspect of my life. Comprehending it, managing it, and using it suddenly became a question of life and death, without ever ceasing to be highly ambiguous and frustrating philosophical questions. This direct experience of and through self-harm pushed me to to develop alternative modes for expressing my feelings on the matter to emergency healthcare workers, therapists, friends, family, and myself--by no means consistently across or within such categories. 

I am in agreement with Millard in that I do not believe that my lived experience of self-harm gives me any unadulterated, “pure” understanding, free of the influences of ideology and my material context. Quite the opposite: no one is more invested in a particular model of self harm then the one who hurts himself, at least until that model fails and its time to set up a new one. At the same time, I believe my experiences afford me access to alternative modes of understanding self-harm, modes no less mediated but charged with meanings not otherwise easily accessible. To this end, my second break with Millard: the production of a new theory of DSH and the social context in which it occurs, or at least the beginnings of one. This is an approach which stresses the importance of DSH’s internal contradictions rather then attempting to resolve them into a single, comprehensive model; ambivalence with regards to one’s own intentions, motivations, and justifications; and a multiplicity of actors within and around the self-harming individual. I call this the theory of Intrapersonal Violence.

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summary of argument?

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This is not a new problem. Though this essay is primarily concerned with responses to self-harm occurring near or after World War 1, cases of people who repeatedly damage their own bodily tissue date back to antiquity, as the second epitaph of this essay goes to show. That is to say, self-harm may very well predate political theory itself.

Nor is the problem purely theoretical. 

This is not to dichotomize between the theoretical and the practical. Perhaps one of the most impactful decisions a person or institution must make when addressing deliberate self harm (here after abbreviated DSH) is how to make sense of this behavior which is so alarming and so baffling to those who do not engage in self harm. How an institution or community chooses to answer and re-answer this question will necessarily impact how it coordinates its responses to all the questions above. 

Insofar as the following composition of reflections, summaries, fractured recollections, and first-person conversations have a single uniting argument, it is this: that the problem of DSH exposes and forces the reevaluation of certain very basic and fundamental assumptions which we have concerning the nature of what it is to be a person—especially assumptions pertaining to what self-interest is and how it is constituted, the meaning of pain, for what reasons bodily autonomy is permitted to exist, and for whom behaviors such as self-care and self-harm are enacted. More specifically, the recent history of DSH demonstrates the ways in which the ideology of liberal capitalism has changed over time, made manifest in the changing and often contradictory ways that DSH is both thought and managed. 

Modes of understanding DSH and “unreason” more broadly have taken on a diverse series of modes, alternatively framed morally, legalistically, bio-mechanically, and psychoanalytically. One of the most thorough histories of DSH I’ve come across, A History of Self-Harm in Britain by Christopher Millard, specifically tracks the role of the social as an explanatory factor, which began to be formulated in earnest, albite in a surprisingly piecemeal, multi-source fashion, during and immediately after World War One. The social then gained near hegemonic status following the second world war, though precisely what role it played and, for that matter, precisely what composed the social changed drastically in the various legal, therapeutic, and theoretical worlds within which self harm resides, never quite limited to nor at home in one or another, but rather shifting, nomad-like, among them all. Following this zenith, the social then rapidly declines as a factor considered …

Of particular interest to me, however, are the ways in which modes of thinking self-harm remain consistent, for they are precisely those qualities of the subject—rational self-interest—which I addressed earlier. ...

 liberalism 

 [...]

[my method...schmitt’s importance of the exception that thinks the general]

Over the course of the following pages I draw on the historical documentation and analysis of Michelle Foucault and Christopher Millard as well as primary sources in order to assemble a history of how DSH has been understood over a relatively narrow cultural milieu, namely the classical and post-classical anglosphere with a focus, again, on the last hundred years or so. I do this not to provide anything like a comprehensive history of DSH, but rather simply to highlight how our understanding of the phenomena has changed and to outline some of the reasons and impacts of those changes, with a particular focus on the political-economic and ____ conditions which interacted with the development and implementation of such understandings. Hopefully I will succeed in presenting to the reader that the history of self-harm is the history of liberal capitalism, 

focusing on debates within self-harm understanding...

[my primary contribution to this discourse is two-fold: first, to show how despite the changes, evolutions, debates, and controversies which have and contiue to influence discussions of self harm, there has remained a profoundly consistent assumption which resonates with modern political philosophy, especially of the liberal political school and its dissidents, nmaely a pre-existing, rational and self-interested subject

second, drawing on my own experience, possit a rupture in how self harm might be understood prior to and/or outside of these assumptions.

I close with some remarks on the form of this essay and the conditions under which it was written, with the attempt to answer the question: what does political theory mean to self-harm.

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before I begin my historical account, two notes on language. 

^need more about interpersonal violence, or maybe save it for the two notes part

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This is because the problem of self-harm runs straight through how we understand ourselves and each other, unsettling the rather privileged assumption that when danger rears its head, its source, at least at the level of intent, will be external to ourselves.

 describe my method: historical (as part of an effort to understand what self-harm is and what it has meant for the construction of the subject),, theoretical (to flesh out the same and) and personal (to provide my own experience as data, yes, but more importantly as source of a qualitative rupture for new, hopefully useful concepts). the goal: two-fold. to shed new light on the impact of self-harm on political philosophy, and to ask what political philosophy means to mental illness. 

I use the language of self-harm and intrapersonal violence advisidly. i try to use the terminology deployed by the primary and secondary sources when discussed for the former, while the later is my own formulation

the fractured nature of the discourse serves n interrelated functions--it mimics/produces the kind of division I have experienced and often attempted to remedy with self-harm. but it also is a kind of symptom. for the past three years writing has been beyond me, and in those days and weeks when I’ve been able to clear my head enough to hew away a little at this godforsaken task, a smattering of paragraphs has often been all I’ve been able to produce. to attempt to re-order it all into something cohering to a more traditional thesis structure is not even now necessarily within my abilities, and even if it were I suspect it might rob something of the spirit of the work. I ask for your patience in this matter.  

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[substance to cover:

-the DSM-5 in the discussion of terminology (IPV vs. DSH vs. NSSI)

-summary/block quote from Milliard detailing the relation between capillary power, concepts, and greater political constellations. mention the connection to the neoliberal turn but don’t go into too much detail. 

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